The present invention relates generally to fasteners for wires, wiring harnesses, cables and other elongated bodies. In particular, it relates to universal fasteners for fastening or otherwise securing wiring harnesses to supporting substrates in machines. A specific embodiment is directed to fastening the wiring harnesses in an electrostatographic printing machine.
In electrostatographic printing apparatus commonly used today a photoconductive insulating member is typically charged to a uniform potential and thereafter exposed to a light image of an original document to be reproduced. The exposure discharges the photoconductive insulating surface in exposed or background areas and creates an electrostatic latent image on the member which corresponds to the image contained within the original document. Alternatively, a light beam may be modulated and used to selectively discharge portions of the charged photoconductive surface to record the desired information thereon. Typically, such a system employs a laser beam. Subsequently, the electrostatic latent image on the photoconductive insulating surface is made visible by developing the image with developer powder referred to in the art as toner. Most development systems employ developer which comprises both charged carrier particles and charged toner particles which triboelectrically adhere to the carrier particles. During development the toner particles are attracted from the carrier particles by the charge pattern of the image areas of the photoconductive insulating area to form a powder image on the photoconductive area. This toner image may be subsequently transferred to a support surface such as copy paper to which it may be permanently affixed by heating or by the application of pressure.
In commercial applications of such products it is necessary to distribute power and/or logic signals to various sites within the machine. Traditionally, this has taken the form of utilizing conventional wires and wiring harnesses in each machine to distribute power and logic signals to the various functional elements in an automated machine. Typically, these wiring harnesses and other wires have been secured to the supporting or guiding substrates of the machine by using tie wraps which are typically threaded through rectangular holes requiring access to both sides of the supporting substrate and after tightening may require the removal of the tail portion near the knot due to space and other functional constraints. Furthermore, frequently the knot has to be oriented due to space limitation. In total, this procedure is highly labor intensive, and may even involve manual operations such as threading from the bottom of a supporting substrate that may have to be accomplished without being able to view the location, all of which is time consuming and extremely costly.